Samuel Alito’s Mysterious Absence From Supreme Court Raises Questions

Samuel Alito was again absent from the Supreme Court on Friday after skipping out on Thursday. No information has yet been provided by the court for Alito’s mysterious absence, which comes as the court is issuing decisions before the end of its term and leaves nothing but questions on his whereabouts.

Is he combating a hangover from a particularly raucous flag day with Martha-Ann? Is he ducking out to delay the decision on Trump’s presidential immunity case?

Alito’s absence poses the possibility that the Supreme Court will have to extend its term into July to complete its decisions for the term. One major case waiting in the wings is a decision on presidential immunity, which will decide if former presidents can extend immunity protections after they leave office—a determination that would greatly benefit Trump in his federal election interference case, currently still on hold.

The most conservative justice on the bench, Alito’s absence hasn’t stopped his name from appearing on Supreme Court decisions. This week, he helped ensure that U.S. citizens can’t sue over their spouses’ visa denials, or in the case of Smith v. Arizona,
declared the court had dealt a “crippling wound on modern evidence law.” Wherever he is, he’s still turning in his homework and is as dramatic as ever.

On Friday, Donald Trump boasted that Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was personally invited by Trump to speak at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July, and had, to the confusion of many, accepted the invitation.

“Our GREAT convention will unify Americans and demonstrate to the nation’s working families they come first,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, announcing O’Brien’s attendance. “When I am back in the White House, the hardworking Teamsters, and all working Americans, will once again have a country they can afford to live in and be respected around the world.”

The news initially provoked skepticism, as the Teamsters have never spoken at the RNC before, and Trump’s pro-billionaire politicking and history of being a scab don’t really align with the blue-collar union, or any union for that matter. The Teamsters released a statement confirming the booking—adding they were waiting on an invite by the Democratic National Convention to do the same.

“General President Sean O’Brien asked to speak at both the RNC and DNC, and we are very happy former President Trump has extended this invitation,” a statement from a Teamsters spokesperson read. “Our 1.3 million members represent every political background, and their message needs to be heard by as wide an audience as possible, and that includes all political candidates running for office.”

O’Brien was elected general president of the Teamsters in 2022. Throughout the 2024 election cycle, O’Brien’s Teamsters have made a series of moves that have provoked upset and confusion among its traditionally Democrat-leaning ranks. The Teamsters met with five candidates for president in December—none major contenders—before donating $45,000 to both the DNC and RNC in December 2023 and January of this year, respectively. In early January, O’Brien met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Later that month, the Teamsters executive board held a roundtable with Trump in D.C., which sparked a cascade of backlash. Executive board member John Palmer, who was invited to attend the meeting and rejected the invitation, issued a letter to O’Brien calling Trump a “known union buster, scab, and insurrectionist.” The Teamsters reportedly invited Biden to a similar meeting to take place the same day, but that meeting didn’t take place until mid-March.

The Teamsters have traditionally endorsed Democratic candidates for president, according to AP’s VoteCast. Teamsters endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, who has touted himself as “the most pro-labor president in American history.”

“There’s always a threat to organized labor, so we want to be proactive and make certain every candidate—not just President Biden—understands how important our issues are,” O’Brien said, after meeting with Biden in March. With Trump’s personal invitation for O’Brien to speak at the RNC, it’s now up to Biden whether O’Brien will be invited to speak at the DNC.

Donald Trump is trying to get the strongest evidence against him in his classified documents case thrown out: the memos written by his former lawyer Evan Corcoran.

The former president and convicted felon’s legal team is expected to ask Judge Aileen Cannon next week to remove the prosecution’s access to memos made by Corcoran, according to The Guardian. The memos note what Trump and his lawyer discussed regarding Trump complying with a court order to search his Mar-a-Lago estate for the missing classified documents.

According to the memos, after Trump received the court’s subpoena, he said to Corcoran, “Well, what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and “Well, look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

Trump’s federal indictment alleged that Trump had his employees (and now co-defendants) Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira move 64 boxes from a storage room to his residence so he could go through them, but only return 30 boxes back to the room where Corcoran would conduct his search. Corcoran would find 38 classified documents there, and Trump reportedly asked him, “Did you find anything? ... Is it bad? Good?” and then made a plucking motion to suggest “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, pluck it out.”

Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue that the memos don’t fit under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege and that chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., should not have allowed them as evidence. And Cannon has been particularly receptive to Trump requests, agreeing to hear pretrial motions that have slowed down proceedings, throwing out parts of the case, and postponing the trial indefinitely.

The Trump-appointed judge, who had minimal trial experience prior to taking the classified documents case, turned down offers from more senior and experienced judges to take over the case. Her actions have drawn criticism, even from one of Trump’s former lawyers, who has called her a “partisan prima donna.” And that’s exactly what Trump wants.

Lauren Boebert has not yet won the Republican nomination in Colorado’s 4th district, but that hasn’t stopped a Democratic challenger from blasting her for her infamous behavior at a performance of Beetlejuice in Denver.

John Padora, a Democrat running to replace Republican Representative Ken Buck in the district, has wasted no time going after Boebert, the best-known candidate in next week’s Republican primary. His new advertisement, recorded at a similar angle to the security camera that captured her vaping and groping her date in the middle of the musical, is going viral.

“I’m sitting in the very same seat Lauren Boebert got kicked out of, the same way she got kicked out of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Now she’s picked up her bags and fled to eastern Colorado,” Padora says in the fundraising spot.

Boebert announced she would not run for reelection in the 3rd district after eking out a reelection victory in 2022 and then being outraised by a Democratic challenger and losing the endorsement of several prominent district Republicans for the upcoming election. She fled to the redder 4th district—but her date-night hijinks seem to have followed her, and Padora is taking full advantage.

“Boebert’s an opportunistic carpetbagger, and we deserve real leadership here in Colorado’s 4th,” Padora says.

Of all of Boebert’s transgressions that Padora might have seized on—promoting the QAnon conspiracy, engaging in election denialism, giving customers at her open-carry restaurant diarrhea by serving them tainted pork—accusing her of carpetbagging seems, if anything, tame.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced Thursday night that he plans to sue the state of New York in retaliation for Donald Trump’s criminal conviction. The conservative AG vowed to “restore the rule of law”—but not the ones that found Trump guilty, of course—and deemed Trump’s hush-money trial “unconstitutional lawfare.”

But it doesn’t seem like Bailey understands the law in New York at all, and it doesn’t look like he’s paid much attention to the details of Trump’s hush-money trial. According to Axios, Bailey is pursuing his lawsuit against New York on the basis that the statute of limitations for misdemeanor business records falsification expired in 2019.

There’s just two big hiccups with Bailey’s argument: Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts, not misdemeanors, and the statute of limitations for those felonies is five years after the start of criminal proceedings—not two like with misdemeanors. It’s also unclear where Bailey is getting 2019 as a statute of limitations from: The federal criminal proceedings against Trump kicked off in 2018 after an explosive Wall Street Journal story stated Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels in 2016. The FBI soon raided Cohen, who that same year pleaded guilty to giving hush-money payments to Daniels and another woman, claiming he did so on Trump’s behalf. State criminal proceedings based on Cohen’s testimony formally began in August 2019, four years before Trump was indicted and five years before he was convicted, all of which fall well within New York’s five-year statute of limitations.

Whether Bailey is just bad at math, the law, or keeping up to date on Trump trial chaos ultimately matters little. His lawsuit represents a new wave of attacks that can be best described as, to use Bailey’s wording, “unconstitutional lawfare” being carried out in retaliation for Trump’s conviction. In his rush to preen himself as the ultimate pro-Trump attorney general (during an election year where he’s running against a member of Trump’s legal team), Bailey may soon find himself falling flat on his face: It doesn’t seem Bailey bothered to look into New York’s extremely strong anti-SLAPP laws, which prohibit against retaliatory lawsuits attempting to impede against public participation of matters of public interest. And convicting a former president certainly constitutes a matter of public interest.